Lady at the O.K. Corral (6 page)

The next few years would prove to be the darkest of Wyatt's life. The grieving young widower brawled in public with Aurilla's brothers, stole horses, and served a month in jail before skipping town. By the time his official biography was published, it would not mention any of his times in “the cold and silent calaboose” as a gambler, pimp, and thief. Josephine may have known only the most general facts about these years. Without acknowledging the aftermath of his brief marriage, she shaped the timeline around his years on the plains, where an unusual fraternity of some ten thousand buffalo hunters honed their drinking and shooting and gambling skills and spawned lifelong friendships. It was here that Wyatt met Bat Masterson, whose career would parallel Wyatt's, and who would become Josephine's friend and admirer. However, during these years, Wyatt was at least as familiar with brothels as he was with buffalo and Bat Masterson.

In cities like Peoria, Illinois, and Wichita, Kansas, prostitution was publicly frowned upon but privately tolerated and regulated as an important source of revenue. It was common practice for mayors and police officials to impose monthly fines or jail terms, castigating the offenders with loud public outcries. A few days later, these revenues safely stored in the city coffers, business would go back to normal. The city treasuries relied on the prostitutes' contribution, and local merchants depended on the “sporting houses” to keep visitors happy and the town lively.

Wyatt was arrested at least twice in Peoria before leaving for Kansas, where he ran brothels with his brother James and James's common-law wife Bessie. In Wichita he entered into a second relationship, though this one had no officiating justice of the peace. He lived for more than a year with Sally Haspel, who was probably the daughter of a local madam who worked with Bessie. Newspaper accounts identify “Sarah Earp” as depraved but good-looking. Both Bessie and Sally endured a grueling cycle of arrests and fines until the spring of 1875, when Wyatt joined the local police force. At this point, the monthly payments ceased, and Sally disappeared from the public record.

Wichita and Dodge City were major hubs in the Kansas cattle trade and temporary homes to throngs of young men returning from months on the open range. “Cow-boys” meant cash to the local businesses, but signaled trouble. When they came to town, soaked with alcohol and tense with gambling challenges, their antics destabilized the fragile peace of a gun-toting community.

Wyatt served in Kansas with distinction as a peace officer. He was paid in cash for each arrest, and mostly he arrested cowboys. Town leaders liked him because he managed to avoid fatalities; most unruly cowboys responded well to a sharp knock on the head, known as buffaloing, and an uncomfortable night in jail. This technique worked nicely because the troublemakers were mostly transients blowing off steam. Things would be different in Tombstone.

Wyatt's world of gambling and guns and rowdies brought him into contact with a rising Dodge City gambler, Doc Holliday, a thin, tubercular dentist from Georgia. Their friendship was sealed when Doc Holliday came to Wyatt's aid in a shootout, tossing a gun to him at an opportune moment.

Loyalty to friends and family was an absolute for the Earps. “Doc was my friend and I was Doc's friend until he died,” Wyatt steadfastly declared, although none of his brothers and few of his friends shared Wyatt's affection for Doc, whose nasty temper was as legendary as his dangerous straight shooting. Bat Masterson detested him. “Physically, Doc Holliday was a weakling who couldn't have whipped a healthy fifteen-year-old boy,” Masterson recalled, dismissing Doc as high-strung and effeminate.

Even with Doc around for excitement, Dodge City was, in Wyatt's words, “losing its snap.” Virgil was scouting the latest boomtown, and urging his brothers to convene there. In September 1879 the Earp caravan set out for Tombstone. Among the party were James and Bessie and her teenage daughter. Doc and his longtime companion and lover, “Big Nose” Kate, had made plans to join them later. Younger brother Morgan Earp—everyone's favorite—and his common-law wife Louisa were also on the way. And there was a new Mrs. Earp: in place of Sally, Celia “Mattie” Blaylock was now sitting next to Wyatt. She had left home as a young girl and was living on her own until she met Wyatt, probably in Fort Griffin, Texas. No beauty, Mattie was a sturdy, large-boned woman with a sweet square face, a mass of curls hiding a broad brow, and long ringlets down her back. She had the look of someone dependable, shy, and long-suffering.

Although Nicholas and Virginia Earp had been joined in a traditional marriage, their sons preferred common-law partnerships requiring nothing other than a voluntary declaration that man and woman were living together as a married couple. This was a popular alternative in the western territories, where couples moved between remote and sometimes dangerous locations where clergymen were not always available. “If a man and woman said, ‘We are Mister and Missus,' they were, that is all there was to it,” recalled one observer of frontier marriage. The self-declared husband and wife could sign legal documents together and were classified as married by the census, but the common-law widow was not eligible to collect her disabled husband's Civil War pension. And, as Mattie Earp would discover, common-law marriages were easy to create, and could be dissolved just as easily.

In Prescott, Virgil and his common-law wife Alvira Packingham Sullivan Earp (known to all as “Allie”) joined the caravan. They had been living in the town where Virgil had been appointed deputy U.S. marshal, the highest office that any of the Earp brothers would hold. Virgil and Alvira had been a couple since 1874, when Allie served Virgil a meal in a Council Bluffs, Iowa, restaurant. It was love at first sight: Allie was immediately drawn to this “big blond” who “looked nice on a horse.” Small and spare, Allie adored Virgil and was the most quick-witted of the group, always ready with a sarcastic retort for anyone other than Virgil.

The last Earp to arrive in Tombstone was Morgan. He too had acquired a common-law wife, Louisa Houston. A longtime sufferer from rheumatoid arthritis, Louisa stayed behind with Morgan's parents in San Bernardino, California. “They are all old fashioned people here,” she confided to her sister, “and I like it very much.” Despite Nicholas's harsh reputation, he and his wife treated Louisa with exceptional kindness, and her health improved in the temperate climate. She knew from Morgan's letters that Tombstone's steady rains and dust storms did not augur well for her health, but she missed him and left San Bernardino as soon as he sent for her.

The Earps came to Tombstone to make money. Everyone dreamed of striking it rich, but Wyatt and his brothers knew better than to rely solely on the vagaries of mining. Wyatt's initial plan was to start a stagecoach line, but he discovered belatedly that the town was already well served. He was not discouraged. “There's other business here, plenty of it,” he anticipated, and with the help of his solid recommendations from Wichita and Dodge City, he signed on as a shotgun messenger for Wells Fargo, while investing with his brothers in mines, water rights, and gambling concessions. But he still aspired to a position on the law force, like Virgil, who had been named chief of police. In a town like Tombstone, peacekeeping went along with lucrative tax collecting.

And Tombstone certainly needed lawmen.

When the Earps joined the community of Tombstone, they encountered the unique social structure of a well-developed boomtown. What looked superficially like a wide-open frontier town was nearly as stratified as Josephine's San Francisco, albeit along different fault lines. The Earp men mixed among political and business leaders, but they did not socialize with them. They might have a drink with the mayor or the biggest mine owner in town, but they were not invited over for supper. Their common-law wives were shunned, not only because they were poorly educated and living in unions unblessed by judges or clergy but because their husbands were gamblers and saloonkeepers. All legal pursuits, to be sure, and considered essential in a frontier town, but not embraced by polite society.

Neither Josephine nor the Earps participated in the conventional world of church socials, literary nights, amateur dramatic benefits, and lending libraries, though these were happening all around them. That Tombstone can best be seen through the eyes of a trio of firsthand observers, whose contemporary diaries and letters offer a compelling picture of Tombstone's aristocracy: Clara Spalding Brown, George Parsons, and Endicott Peabody.

Clara Spalding Brown came to Tombstone with her husband a few months before Josephine, enduring a stagecoach trip so bad that “nothing short of a life and death matter” would tempt her to travel again during the summer. A talented writer and loyal San Diegan, she began her distinguished journalism career with a series of colorful, keenly observed letters to the
San Diego Union
. She drew social distinctions with a fine and knowing hand: “There are frequent dances, which I have heard called ‘respectable,' ” she relayed to her readers; “but as long as so many members of the demi-monde, who are very numerous and very showy here, patronize them, many honest women will hesitate to attend.” Those honest women preferred more exclusive balls with good musicians and refreshments served by “darkies, in imitation of metropolitan style.”

George Parsons came to Tombstone early in 1880. The eldest son of an affluent and well-educated eastern family of lawyers and bankers, Parsons had been a bank teller in San Francisco and came to Tombstone to chase his dream of striking it rich. He was warmly welcomed into the homes of the mining magnates who were the gentry of the Arizona Territory and the first families of Tombstone. Unlike Brown, Parsons wrote in private about his daily life, mostly short, telegraphic journal entries that registered the weather and political climate and catalogued his business dealings, as well as his social engagements and random observations that interested him, such as the atmosphere of murder and mayhem in Tombstone, or the sight of a lesbian couple embracing in public.

The third member of this unusual Greek chorus was Endicott Peabody, the future founder and headmaster of Groton, where he would one day teach the school's most famous graduate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As a handsome young newly ordained minister, Endicott enjoyed his cigar and his drink, and riding enthusiastically around Tombstone and its environs, recruiting congregants. A frequent letter writer, he chronicled life in Tombstone for the enjoyment of his friends and family back east, expressing his surprise at the sophistication of Tombstone. Time would tell if he would stand by his early observation: “The gamblers said to be a very decent lot, Cowboys alone bad.”

The Earp wives lived only a short distance from Brown, Parsons, and Peabody, but they might as well have been a million miles away. They cleaned their houses, socialized among themselves, and made money with Allie's prize possession, the sewing machine that they used to mend canvas tents for the miners for a penny a yard. Other than Bessie, none of them had children, perhaps in deliberate recognition that babies and boomtowns were not well matched. The Earp women knew nothing of cowboys or politics. They hardly ever visited “downtown,” though it was five minutes away. On one occasion Allie and Mattie ventured out and returned home tipsy, almost too terrified to face their husbands. As Allie recalled:

Me and Mattie, Wyatt's wife, wanted to go down and peek in the nice hotels and restaurants. So on a terrible hot morning when the men was away we went and had a good time lookin'. Then we met a friend who gave us a sip of all different kind of wines, some real fine. We got home and in bed all right, and everything would have been jim-dandy but Wyatt and Virgil came home for dinner for the first time during that hot spell. All I remember is waking up and seeing Virgil sittin' by the bed stiff as a poker and Mattie spillin' the coffee Wyatt was makin' her drink.

“That was our life: workin' and sitting home. Good women didn't go any place,” Allie remembered. “Everything was nice if you had money, and we didn't so it wasn't.”

For drifters like Allie and Mattie, attachment to their husbands and extended family was everything. Loyalty was unconditional, and the Earp brothers were beyond anyone's criticism, though in private, Allie struggled to find anything to praise in Wyatt. She found him serious, self-centered, and intimidating, like Nicholas Earp. Where Virgil was always ready with a joke and a loving word for his wife, Wyatt mocked Mattie's passivity and may have also complained about her fondness for laudanum, an opium-based painkiller that was a common remedy for toothache or cough or insomnia.

JOSEPHINE MARCUS BEHAN'S
social status was even murkier than that of the Earp wives. She was caught in a netherworld between wife and mistress, stepmother and governess. Johnny continued to escort her to social affairs, where she mixed with couples who were legally married, such as the Dunbars and the Joneses. After all, she argued to Johnny, couples did marry, even in Tombstone. For example, Maria Duarte, her stagecoach companion, had become the lawfully wedded Mrs. Pete Spence. Even James Earp's stepdaughter had married a local businessman in a legal ceremony, despite the fact that her mother, former madam Bessie Earp, was in a common-law relationship, as were the rest of the Earp women.

Josephine had the additional complication of being Jewish, which she never hid but never used to bridge her social isolation. Tombstone had an active Hebrew Association, and counted a considerable number of Jews among its mining executives and merchants. German or Polish heritage mattered far less in the frontier, so she was no longer subject to that prejudice. She had no interest in socializing within the Jewish families or meeting any of Tombstone's eligible Jewish entrepreneurs, but gravitated toward those who played a distinctive role in the frontier—the lawmen and the gamblers. She was friendly with Sol Israel, the Jewish proprietor of the Union News Depot, but in a town where newspapers were extremely popular, everybody knew Sol.